Litigation and Cooperation

Having demonstrated that about a third of the speeches in our corpus of forensic oratory were written for delivery by synegoroi rather than main parties, the author investigates the way in which synegoroi and main parties divided the argumentation between them in individual cases.

She shows that trials of major political importance were conducted by teams of pleaders, and she concludes that such legal actions are best understood as team-based contests rather than as rhetorical confrontations between individual members of the Athenian élite. The implications of this for our overall understanding of the Athenian democracy and the political part played by the courts are discussed, and it is suggested as a possibility that team-based public actions offered a wider scope for participation by ordinary citizens than is normally allowed by modern historians.